Photos emerged Sunday
night of Hutchins' self-assembled IT hub, which consists of
computer servers, at least three monitors, and video games. Other
images reportedly show the self-taught coder at Defcon in Las
Vegas, a renowned conference for the hacking community.

Twitter/MalwareTechBlog

The researcher — who is known as MalwareTech on Twitter and has
been described as an "accidental hero" — registered a garbled
domain name hidden in the malware to track the virus,
unintentionally halting it. Hutchins described his efforts in a
detailed blog post
titled "How to Accidentally Stop a Global Cyber Attacks" on
Saturday.

"I was quickly able to get a sample of the malware with the help
of Kafeine, a good friend and fellow researcher," Hutchins wrote.
"Upon running the sample in my analysis environment I instantly
noticed it queried an unregistered domain, which i promptly
registered.

"We prevented the spread of the ransomware and prevented it
ransoming any new computer since the registration of the domain
(I initially kept quiet about this while i reverse engineered the
code myself to triple check this was the case, but by now
Darien's tweet had gotten a lot of traction)."

Twitter/MalwareTechBlog

Andrew Mabbitt, a cofounder of Fidus, said on Twitter that
Hutchins was "one of the most intelligent and talented people I
know."

"He gets paid to do his hobby which is most people's dream in
life," he added.

The attack took the form of ransomware that is nicknamed
"WannaCry". Ransomware is malicious software that encrypts data
on a victim's computer and then asks for payment in return for
decryption. In this case, messages seen by affected NHS staff
members showed that the attackers were asking for $300 (£232) in
Bitcoin in exchange for decryption.

Europol's executive director, Robert Wainwright, told
ITV that there were at least 200,000 victims, including the
NHS, across 150 countries and that the number would most likely
increase Monday morning when people return to work.